ACLU demands disclosure of details on CIA drone strikes

“We think it’s clear … that there is a drone program run by the U.S. government,” ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer told a federal appeals court in Washington. 

“The hard question is what is the CIA’s role and whether the CIA is actively using drones to carry out targeted killings,” Jaffer said during the hearing, according to Bloomberg. 

{mosads}The civil liberties group is suing the agency for refusing to hand over documents regarding how CIA conducts picks its targets for drone strikes, how it coordinates those strikes with foreign governments and how it evaluates the number of civilian casualties from those operations. 

Agency officials denied the group’s Freedom of Information Act request, claiming those details were exempt under the national security clause under FOIA. 

Further, the CIA would neither confirm nor deny such documents regarding the agency’s drone operations even exist, Bloomberg reports. 

However, top U.S. defense and national security officials including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan have publicly acknowledged ongoing operations involving armed unmanned drones. 

But public admission of the program does not mean the CIA is required to make information tied to those operations public knowledge, Stuart Delery, head of the Justice Department’s civil division, told the court on Thursday. 

The ACLU lawsuit comes as the Obama administration is coming under heavy fire for its recent expansion and aggressive use of the key counterterrorism tactic. 

The White House’s newly expanded authority governing drone strikes has allowed American drones to hammer away at suspected terror targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen with increased accuracy and lethality. 

But critics argue the expanded drone strike policy includes loopholes allowing the White House to claim drops in collateral damage, when in reality the strikes are no safer to civilians than before.